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Get Your Game On! Video Game Reviews

Oh! Hello there, since time has stopped welcome to my first ever video game review! Since we’re on the subject of Shonen Fighters what more of a fitting game to review that

J-Stars Victory VS+

This is a game developed by Spike Chunsoft and Published by Bandai Namco Entertainment. It was originally released in Japan on March 19, 2014 for the PS3 and the PSVita, since then it was released in both North America and Europe almost a year later on June 26, 2015(Europe) and June 30, 2015(North America) respectively. It now also has a PS4 version in both North America and Europe as well to go along with its PS3 and PSVita counter parts. But enough of the legal jazz lets get right down to brass tacks shall we?

Let’s Start With The Cast!

J-Star Victory VS+ features a wide variety of shonen style characters to fight with including..

J-Stars plays as an over the shoulder 3D fighter so you can move in all directions, teams are comprised of Two Playable characters and one Support character. You can have up to 4 players playing at one time(two players for each team) while the A.I. controls the Support character but the player does trigger the Support character by pressing the L2 button on the PS3/PS4 controller. In order to win a battle the three sections of the win gauge which is located at the top of the screen needs to be filled, the gauge gets filled one at a time when one character defeats their opponent.

Each Playable character comes with a set amount of attacks which include

Light Attacks(Square Button)

Heavy Attacks(Triangle Button)

both of which can be mixed to create combos

Power Attacks(Circle Button)

Playable characters have two Power Attacks, Up on the Stick + Circle Button and Down on the Stick + Circle Button. Each Power Attack is unique to each character and plays to their strengths.

Each character also comes with an Area Attack, Guard Break, Stamina Charge and a Special Attack. The Moves are trigger by holding R1 and pressing the corresponding buttons, Circle, Triangle, X and Circle.

There are also Ultimate moves for each Playable Character as well, they are unique to those characters and deliver massive damage if they connect with the opposition. Finishing moves are triggered by filling the power bar at the top of the screen then clicking in on the R3 stick. Though there are sometimes when you have to click the R3 stick at least twice to trigger the Ultimate move because some like Naruto and Younger Toguro have transformations.

this is a long video, detailing some of the game play from J-Stars…just to kind of tease you a bit

By using all of these different techniques you can lead your team to victory!

And how about a story mode?

Victory Vs+ does come with a sort of Story Mode to it as well, it’s known as the J-Adventure mode!. You can pick from one of four story Arcs to play to go through the story mode, the Dynamic Arc which has you playing with the team of Luffy and Ace from One Piece and Seiya from Saint Seiya, the Hope Arc which has you playing with the team of Naruto(Naruto) and Yusuke(Yu Yu Hakusho), the Investigation Arc which has you playing with the team of Toriko and Zebra from Toriko and Goku from DBZ and the Pursuit Arc which has you playing with the team of Ichigo(Bleach), Oga(Beelzebub) and Hiei(Yu Yu Hakusho)

In each story your contacted by a mysterious voice saying that there is going to be a tournament to determine who is the best Jump Hero, you then set sail on your very own ship(which pretty much starts out as just a boat, a mast and a sail). You progressively upgrade your ship as you move through the story to make it stronger in order to over come the obstacles that are put in your path in order to progress the story, as you move through the story you are often challenged to solve various side missions in order to earn J points while picking up more crew members for your ship(support characters mostly). You’ll also earn J cards for the J Customize section in order to make your characters more powerful but you can also buy Bronze, Silver and Gold coins which unlock various cards from Regular to Ultra Rare.

Also during the story you’ll see other ships sailing around, those ships are inhabited by the other Jump Heroes who are on their own stories. Your able to challenge them to fights to earn J Points and it doesn’t progress the story so your free to challenge every body possible to stack Points if you want.

Probably one of the most fun aspects of the story is the fact that your able to visit all of these different places in one central hub world, you can visit Karasuno High School(Haikyuu) one minute and go to The Village Hidden in the Leafs(Naruto) the next. It’s amazing how much time was put into creating this one big world where everyone meets in one big crossover.

and now for the Soundtrack

J-Stars Victory Vs+ is composed by both Yasuharu Takanashi and Hiromi Mizutani, Takanashi-san can be credited for composing all of the Naruto movies along with the Pretty Cure All Stars movies and the movies for Fresh Pretty Cure, Heartcatch Pretty Cure, Suite Pretty Cure and Smile Pretty Cure. He has also composed the Fairy Tale movie and anime along with Naruto Shippuden, Mononoke, Ikki Tousen(Dragon Destiny, Great Guardians and Xtreme Xecutor), Log Horizon and most recently Sailor Moon Crystal, Gotta be the Twin-Tail!, The Testament of Sister New Devil! and Show By Rock!!. Mizutani-san can be credited for composing the Toriko soundtrack, the Sunday without God soundtrack and the Non Non Biyori soundtracks.

The soundtrack is composed of singular themes for each playable character along with different versions of the J-Stars Victory Vs intro screen song. There is also background BGM as well to set scenes during both the J-Adventure mode and the regular battle modes.

and finally the Online battling

At a glance once I started playing online, I realized that there where already people who were really good at this game. That kind of takes away from the online for various reasons but it also gives a great challenge to win a match online. It doesn’t take long to find a match either, finding a match is probably the easiest thing to do on there. Really its all based on the connection the host of the lobby has that will help you get good experience with online matches. While it may take a while to get used to playing against other people, it will help you in the long run to get better at working with team mates and finding out better ways to win matches.

so after looking over everything that J-Stars Victory Vs+ has to offer, it’s time to find out the score!

Everything about this game is just incredible, minus the fact that the online has a few issues here and that a lot of people may or may not know who most of the characters are, J-Stars Victory Vs+ is the best put together fighting game I’ve seen in a while. It never fails to bring the fun when ever I fire up my copy for PS3

All in All,

J-Stars Victory Vs+ gets a 9/10 from me…

And Time Resumes.

Whew! well that does it for my first video game review, and what a doozy it was. Thank you so much for reading through my review and hopefully you pick this game up yourself.